Moving house as a Wargamer

I have to be honest... the reason I have been neglectful in posting blogs the last few weeks is because I have moved house. Not that I had the difficult enough task of moving locally, though. I had to trek all my stuff across the country!! We decided to move all the way from Devon to Essex, just to be closer to our families.

It was a very stressful time for me and my partner. Somehow, we got through it!

(We didn't use a van like this.)

One of the biggest tasks for me was trying to pack up all of my wargaming and hobby things. Dismantling my hobby area was a job I had to do by myself as my partner didn't want to risk putting things in the wrong boxes (or breaking anything!)

When loading the van I tried my best to keep the terrain and boxes of fragile models at the top to keep them safe. Lucky for me, the bottom area of the van was filled with a few thousand heavy boxes of books, books and more books! (I'm loathe to use the word 'literally', but it is almost true! For certain, there was more books than clothes. More books than everything else put together!)

A few of my terrain pieces did suffer some light damage but, thankfully, nothing a little glue won't fix. And my Necromunda minis need repainting anyway, so I wasn't too worried if they got chipped.

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My biggest piece of advice to anyone having to go through this is to label all your hobby boxes as accurately as possible! I'm so glad I did as it really makes finding all the things easier when I want to get started working on them again (once things have settled down).

Whenever I buy anything online I keep all the packing. This was really helpful for keeping all my terrain safe in transit.

The hardest part of all this moving trauma (at least in terms of my hobby) was leaving my gaming group. We had been playing Necromunda and other games together for three years now.

Our last gaming session together continued on our Dark Heresy campaign. I'm happy that the rest of the group will carry on meeting and playing Dark Heresy (and hopefully Necromunda) together, but I have to admit that it will not be as easy to find a decent group of gaming friends in my new area.

It felt good though to let my Dark Heresy character die in a blaze of Glory - killing an unbound daemon-host before being gunned down by around 30 cultists! It was a fitting end for the self-sacrificing character profile I had built for myself.

Hopefully I will get to meet up with those guys if I get a chance to visit Plymouth. It would be great to game with them all again in the future.

For now, my gaming future involves a search through local gaming shops and clubs to see what the community is like in Essex. I can only cross my fingers and hope that I will find some like-minded new friends who can match my gaming needs.

Ultimately.... moving as a gamer involves a lot of organisational skills, and a strong faith that wherever you end up your hobby will not die.

Remember - Label! Label! Label!